Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York - "The Human Situation" Exhibition

The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

April 10 – June 21, 2025

Sylvia Sleigh 

The Blue Dress, 1970

Oil on canvas, 66½ × 34½ inches (168.9 × 87.6 cm) 

Collection of Audrey and Joseph Anastasi 

© Estate of Sylvia Sleigh, 

courtesy of the Estate of Sylvia Sleigh and Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Alice Neel 

Pregnant Nude, 1967

Oil on canvas, 36½ × 57¼ inches (92.7 × 145.4 cm)

Private Collection, New York, courtesy of AWG Art Advisory

© Estate of Alice Neel, 

courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh. The exhibition, conceived by Saara Pritchard, marks the first focused presentation of Marcia Marcus (b. 1928), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), who each worked in New York City and shared in its artistic circles in the dynamic decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During this period, they portrayed mutual sitters, exhibited together, and participated in public discussions. Their representations of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are distinctive in form and style, yet share in their evocation of the human spirit, capturing Sylvia Sleigh’s reflection “The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits...”

In 1973, paintings by the three figurative artists were on view in the unprecedented exhibition Women Choose Women, organized by Women in the Arts and presented at the New York Cultural Center. The three painters would exhibit together again in the following years, notably in Women’s Work: American Art 1974, Philadelphia Civic Center and In Her Own Image, Samuel S. Fleischer Art Memorial, administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (both part of Focus on Women in the Visual Arts, 1974)—as well as Sons and Others: Women Artists See Men, Queens Museum (1975). Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh too were early participants in the collaborative installation The Sister Chapel, PS1, New York (1978)—from which Marcia Marcus eventually withdrew due to teaching and other exhibition commitments—with Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh unveiling large-scale paintings.

In their works, each artist differentiated herself from prevailing modes of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism—capturing Neel’s predecessor Robert Henri’s principle “Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.” Their distinguished images depicted many of the same artistic and critical figures, including David Bourdon, Sari Dienes, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, and John Perreault, among others, as well as self-portraits. They also each painted or collaborated with writers and curators such as Lucy Lippard, Cindy Nemser, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Rose, Marcia Tucker, and Sleigh’s husband Lawrence Alloway.

While working at different phases of maturity in their practices during the 1960s and 1970s, they experienced the period’s socio-political movements, including for civil and women’s rights. This historical environment is described by Lucy Lippard in her exhibition catalogue introduction for Women Choose Women: 

“A largescale exhibition of women’s art in New York is necessary at this time for a variety of reasons: because so few women have up until now been taken seriously enough to be considered for, still less included in, museum group shows; because there are so few women in the major commercial galleries; because young women artists are lucky if they can find ten successful older women artists to whom to look as role models; because although seventy-five percent of the undergraduate art students are female, only two percent of their teachers are female. And above all—because the New York museums have been particularly discriminatory, usually under the guise of being discriminating.” 

Although the three artists aligned with and participated in feminist causes to varying degrees, the energies of the movement created a focus on women’s art, resulting in exhibitions, galleries such as AIR Gallery and Soho 20 Gallery, grassroots publications, organizations including Women’s Interart Center and Women’s Caucus for Art, and panel discussions, in which they each featured. The portraits by Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh gesture towards this critical art-historical moment, while illuminating for viewers each artist’s distinctive point of view. 

As a testament to their legacies, the exhibition features works by contemporary figurative painters Jenna Gribbon, Karolina Jabłońska, Chantal Joffe, Nikki Maloof, Wangari Mathenge, and Claire Tabouret, who carry forward the tradition of rendering lived images of self, family, friends, and the home. Presenting recent and new canvases created on the occasion of the exhibition, the contemporary artists share in the history and atmosphere of community, and expand upon the themes of womanhood, intimate portraiture, the nude, and the still life that underlie The Human Situation. 

LEVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK

19 East 64th Street, New York City

www.levygorvydayan.com

Related Posts:

Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973 @ Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, October 12 - December 2, 2017

Alice Neel: The Early Years @ David Zwirner, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York, February 26 - April 13, 2019

Alice Neel @ Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 - April 15, 2001

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious @ Ortuzar, New York, February 12 – April 5, 2025

Artist Sylvia Sleigh @ Ortuzar, New York - "Every leaf is precious" Exhibition

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious

Ortuzar, New York

February 12 – April 5, 2025

Ortuzar presents Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious, the first solo exhibition of works by Welsh-born artist Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010) in New York in over fifteen years. The presentation ranges from an early 1950 self-portrait painted in London to costumed scenes staged as late as 1996, with a focus on significant portraits made at the height of Sleigh’s visibility in the late 1960s and 1970s.  

Sylvia Sleigh first came to critical attention at this time for her reversal of academic gender norms, posing nude male friends as odalisques and bathers or as grooming before a mirror, time-honored themes traditionally reserved for women models. A paradoxical veneration for art history suffuses these works: despite her radical subversion of the male gaze and its longstanding taste for the passive female muse, the artist maintains a reverence for the canon, quoting allegorical compositions of early Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite and sixteenth-century Venetian masters. Sleigh’s practice, however, was not a simple inversion of the power dynamics of these conventions. She rejected the objectification of her subjects, transforming her sitters from anonymous archetypes into identifiable characters from her own life. The artist’s commitment to individuation is most evident in her meticulous attention to facial expressions, style as evidenced in clothing, hair or interior design, and the naming of her artist peers in her titling. She was explicit about her intent, stating, “I always painted people, and always people I know. The importance of individualism–every leaf, every person is precious, and should be loved.” [1]

Sleigh’s formal education combined training at the Brighton School of Art with later studies in art history at the University of London. Although she exhibited throughout her early career in the U.K., Sleigh received little public recognition until after her move to New York in 1961, accompanied by her husband, art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway. There, the couple became enmeshed in an overlapping milieu of artists and intellectuals, bolstered by Alloway’s ties to prominent art world figures and Sleigh’s friendships with leading female artists through her involvement with feminist cooperatives like A.I.R and SOHO 20 Gallery, which she co-founded. 

Sylvia Sleigh began chronicling her relationships as early as 1950 in At the Cafe, a double portrait of herself and Lawrence Alloway dressed in black-tie and pearls. However, it was later during her time in New York that she began to move beyond painting straightforward portraits of her social circle, instead casting her friends as characters within constructed scenarios. This process was decidedly social, involving live sessions where sitters were arranged in intimate, lived-in interiors that eschewed the neutrality of a studio. In Allan Robinson (1968), Sylvia Sleigh depicts her painter friend as a large-format odalisque reclining on a white sheepskin blanket, his steely gaze directed outward. The soft fuzz of Robinson’s body-hair pattern echoes the texture of the surrounding material, transfiguring the body into a decorative surface, or what Sleigh referred to as its “natural embroidery.” [2] Sylvia Sleigh not only mimics a historic pose but pursues a formal inquiry into the Orientalist precedents she so admired, characterized by highly technical representations of ornate interiors and elaborately patterned textiles. Works like Felicity Rainnie Reclining (1972) and Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano (1975), each depicting one of Sleigh’s recurring muses, incorporate crisp suntan lines on the figures to create shapes that harmonize with the arranged geometry and decorative motifs of the surfaces on which they rest.

Amid the 1970s New York art scene, where Minimalism and Pop held sway over direct representations of the body, Sleigh’s work was often dismissed as lacking formal sophistication. Linda Nochlin confronts the notion of quality as a “red herring” in assessments of Sleigh’s work. [3] She instead contends that the discomfort with Sleigh’s style arises from the artist’s deliberate confrontation with the roles we perceive as “natural,” exposing the, for some unsettling, fluidity of identity. Nowhere is this notion more explicit than in Sleigh’s double and triple portraits, where subjects are depicted from multiple angles, embodying different qualities or, as Sleigh attributed, “mysteries of the personality.” [4] Deliberately invoking Anthony Van Dyck’s Triple Portrait of Charles I (1635–36), Triple Portrait of Philip Golub (1971) observes the son of artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub from three classical angles: profile, frontal, and three-quarters. The painting’s shifting physical perspective serves as a metaphor for the transformative properties of the gaze, where the identity of the person observed changes depending on who is looking and how. 

A game of misrecognition courses through Sleigh’s oeuvre, where her deft manipulation of references and so-called anachronisms forms the cornerstone of her postmodern reimaginings of the past. In Court of Pan (After Luca Signorelli) (1973), for instance, Sleigh creates a precise replica of a fresco by the Renaissance artist destroyed in a fire during World War II. Lawrence Alloway plays the court musician, while Philip Golub appears as Pan, the reclining Giuliano de Medici, and finally as the aged shepherd. Sylvia Sleigh asks us to simultaneously see and not see Golub and Alloway—both known individuals to Sleigh’s audience and archetypes that disrupt the original fresco’s historical allegory of pre-enlightenment virtues. A similar tension occurs in Annunciation: Paul Rosano (1975), where the artist reimagines her beloved model as a contemporary Archangel Gabriel—a divine messenger bare-chested and clad in cut offs, delivering tidings of holy conception in the latest 1970s countercultural trends. Sean Pratt as Dorante from “The Game of Love and Chance” (1996) takes on the subject of role-play in its most literal sense. The painting depicts the actor in costume from his portrayal of Dorante in the Pearl Theater Company’s 1993 rendition of Marviaux’s Commedia dell’arte-inspired play that centers around mistaken identities. Through her work, Sylvia Sleigh bridges the historically distinct realms of portraiture and genre painting, asserting art history as a living, ongoing dialogue deeply bound in the lived experiences of her contemporaries. 

Sylvia Sleigh (b. 1916; d. 2010) lived and worked in New York City. Solo exhibitions include Invitation to a Voyage, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY (2023); Sylvia Sleigh, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England (2013); Sylvia Sleigh: Working at Home, Freymond-Guth & Co. Fine Arts, Zurich (2010); Sylvia Sleigh: New Work & Portraits of Critics, SOHO 20 Chelsea, New York (2004); An Unnerving Romanticism: The Art of Sylvia Sleigh and Lawrence Alloway, The Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA (2001). Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland, among others. In 1982, she was the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2008 was honored with the Distinguished Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association. 

____________

[1] Sylvia Sleigh, Interview with Trinity Clark, September 1996 in: Crossing the Threshold (New York: Steinbaum Krauss Gallery,

1998).

[2] Sylvia Sleigh, “Notes on Painting the Nude,” 1975 in: Sylvia Sleigh Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

[3] Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists: Painters of the Figure,” Arts Magazine 48, no. 4 (December 1973–January 1974)

[4] Sylvia Sleigh, Undated statement, in: Sylvia Sleigh papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

ORTUZAR 

5 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzar.com